How do you get around the problem of one of these widgets taking forever to load and slowing down your site's render time? I noticed with the "Like" button that it was, on average, too slow to use on our home page. Am I doing it wrong?
We have a "Tweet this" link above our maps that has been getting good usage, and costs us nothing in terms of YADNSLU (yet another DNS lookup).
The way I look at it is: An in-house same-domain solution's the slickest and fastest.... but you lose out on any network-effect recommendations.
That said, facebook widgets are ridiculously expensive in terms of domain lookups and requests.
But back to the topic of tweet buttons. Twitter's 3-request button beats the heck out of the Tweetmeme iframe+javascript franken-thing. I just looked on Tweetmeme's site ( http://tweetmeme.com/about/retweet_button ), and even they recommend using the twitter button: "We recommend using the Twitter Tweet Button. You can find more details about it on the Twitter goodies page."
We have a "Tweet this" link above our maps that has been getting good usage, and costs us nothing in terms of YADNSLU (yet another DNS lookup).